Adam Cooper, photo by Steve Vaughan
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Swan Lake Cooper Leads Leicester's On Your Toes

Acclaimed ballet dancer Adam Cooper will choreograph and star next month in the Leicester Haymarket Theatre's production of On Your Toes. The revival, staged as part of the year-long Richard Rodgers' centenary celebrations, runs from 3 to 25 May 2002.

Rodgers and Hart's 1936 musical comedy is set in the ballet world, where a jealous male dancer hires a gangster to indispose the leading man so that he can take his place for the opening night performance. It was last professionally produced in the UK in 1984 at the West End's Palace Theatre, starring Natalie Makarova and Tim Flavin. On Your Toes features songs such as "There's a Small Hotel" as well as the famous ballet sequence "Slaughter on 10th Avenue".

A former principal with the Royal Ballet, Cooper rose to popular prominence as the Swan in Matthew Bourne's male Swan Lake for Adventures in Motion Pictures, which won him the Time Out and Evening Standard Awards for Best Dance Performance. His other credits include Cinderella for AMP and Elegy For Two' for Images of Dance. On film, and he appeared briefly as the adult Billy in the award-winning 2000 hit Billy Elliot.

Cooper will be joined in the On Your Toes 20-strong cast by Kathryn Evans, Linzi Hateley, Greg Pichery, Matthew Malthouse, Simon Coulthard, Marguerite Porter, Russell Dixon and Irek Mukhamedov.

The Leicester Haymarket production will be directed by theatre artistic director Paul Kerryson and designed by Paul Farnsworth, with musical arrangements and direction by Julian Kelly and lighting by Chris Ellis.

- by Tim Connor

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